Journal Article

Reshaping Internationalization Strategy and Control for Global E-Commerce and Digital Transactions: A Hayekian Perspective

Wu, Jie, Cha, Hongryol, Kotabe, Masaaki

2023

Overview

As the sharing economy has grown rapidly and replaced the traditional businesses, new rules and norms for data and digital trade have emerged divergently in many countries. Such divergence in global e-commerce policies may be a major barrier to the internationalization of the sharing economy business. This paper aims to develop an internationalization theory that addresses how the sharing economy firms can internationalize under the condition of the divergence of global e-commerce policies. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge economy approach, we build a new internationalization theory for the sharing economy firms that facilitate autonomously self-organized business ecosystems and adapt to the lack of harmonized rules and norms for the sharing economy. We first theorize on the attributes of the digital platform-based transactions for the internationalization of the sharing economy firms and then provide some insights into the current international debates of e-commerce policies. Our theory offers two main insights: (1) the competitive advantages of the sharing economy firms stem mainly from digital platform algorithms to catalyze digital platform-based transactions between autonomous actors; (2) the divergence of global e-commerce policies and different internet regimes in different countries may affect the internationalization of business models based on such digital platform-based transactions.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Business / Business forms / Business models / Companies / Competitive advantage / Computer platforms / Digital economy / Economics / Electronic commerce / Environmental economics / Globalization / International trade / Internet / Knowledge economy / Multinational corporations / Regulation / Sharing economy / Strategic management / Theory / Trade / Transactions